Likert scale in education: meaning, types and examples

Likert scale in education is a resource to quickly and easily evaluate different aspects of your educational strategies. 

This is a test-type questionnaire that allows you to get more concrete answers than a simple yes or no, so that you can improve your content, better choose your learning dynamics and analyze the performance of students and teachers. 

If you want to know an effective tool to improve the quality of your educational programs and increase the satisfaction of your students, this article will be of interest to you. 

You will discover what a Likert scale is, the types that exist and some practical examples of how to make the most of them.

What is a Likert scale?  

A Likert scale is a numerical scale that allows you to evaluate all types of products and services in a simple way, using a test-type questionnaire, but that proposes more accurate answers than a simple yes or no. 

What is a Likert Scale in education?

A Likert scale in education is an effective tool to easily evaluate students and teachers, but you can also use it to obtain an evaluation of the pedagogical content, the strategies used, the activities proposed or your brand image. 

For all these reasons, it is very useful in instructional design.

In short, this resource allows you to analyze the entire educational universe to identify strengths or areas for improvement and to segment participants’ responses.

A great advantage is that this type of questionnaire can be automated thanks to digitalized evaluations. This process provides objective results and also allows you to manage and adapt its format to the type of information you want to collect. 

Likert scale structure

In its general structure, conceived by the psychologist Rensis Likert, after whom the form is named, there are several items aimed at evaluating a specific aspect, such as satisfaction. 

These items are propositions that express a positive or negative idea, such as “I learned a lot with the activity we just did”. 

To respond, the student has several options that are classified on an evolving scale that goes, for example, from total agreement to total disagreement, or from total satisfaction to total dissatisfaction. 

Between one extreme and the other, more nuanced responses can be added.

Finally, to complete the evaluation, the results are summed up to provide relevant information about the product or service.

To delve deeper into the definition of Likert scales, it is necessary to look at the different types that you can implement in your educational strategies. 

Types of Likert Scales

There are 2 basic types of Likert scales that you can implement in your educational programs: 

1. A 5-item scale.
2. A 7-item scale. 

Thanks to these scales, you can measure concepts such as frequency, importance, quality or agreement, among many other possibilities.

5 point Likert scale

The 5-Level Likert scale, as its name suggests, offers respondents 5 graded answer options, with 2 extreme, 2 intermediate and 1 neutral options to choose from. 

Thus, if we were to use the 5 point Likert scale to measure agreement, the options might be as follows 

1. I strongly agree. 
2. I find it acceptable. 
3. I neither agree nor disagree. 
4. I disagree in some respects.
5. I strongly disagree.

One of the advantages of this scale is that it can be easily integrated into different education types of assessments and can handle large numbers of respondents. 

On the other hand, it is somewhat limiting for aspects that require more nuance to obtain usable results.

7-point Likert Scale

The 7-point Likert scale uses 7 different options to select a more nuanced response than the 5-point Likert scale because the respondent can choose between 2 extreme, 2 moderate, 2 intermediate and 1 neutral. 

If we take the previous example oriented to measure people’s agreement, the 7 levels of the Likert scale can be: 

1. I strongly agree. 
2. I find it acceptable. 
3. I somewhat agree.
4. I neither agree nor disagree. 
5. I somewhat disagree. 
6. I strongly disagree.
7. I strongly disagree. 

As you can see, the more response options you provide, the more detail you will get from your clients or students. 

Although it all depends on what you want to measure and how the responses are presented, because from one type of Likert scale to another, the difference in certain contexts may be insignificant or cause a bias in the answers. 

In education, other Likert scales may be useful, such as the 10-point Likert scale that you are probably familiar with from the standard service or product evaluation forms that are usually sent out by customer service departments.

For greater accuracy, always based on the question, you can complete the Likert scales including the possibility of giving a free answer at the end of the form. 

Likert Scale examples

At this point, you already know what a Likert scale is and how to use it. 

With the intention of solidifying this information, we will give you some examples of items related to education: 

Likert scale for educational satisfaction

If you want to measure the satisfaction with an educational program, you can consider it by thematic blocks and within each of them add several items. 

See the following example:

One of the most important dimensions when proposing distance evaluations is the security you offer to your students. 

At Smowltech, we have been developing for many years a series of proctoring plans that can be adapted to your needs and that integrate the latest technological advances in distance supervision. We offer you a free demo, which you can request in just a few clicks, so that you can see first-hand the effectiveness of our solutions.